


bunched up in your hands

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/M, Gen, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, and then in a stunning turnabout, first aradia paps sollux, sollux paps aradia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-27
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 19:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1060754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux can't sleep and Aradia can't win.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. recuperate

Aradia blinks awake, eyes gummy with sleep. Her shoulder aches, and her neck where she’s settled herself on Sollux’s couch, everything taught without the sopor and the sedatives.

She pulls hair from mouth in strands as she sits up, coiling coarse ringlets around her fingers as she rubs at the corner of her eye. Despite the daylight burning in sharp lines around the hiveblock’s blackout curtains, the city still rumbles soft around them. Sollux sits at his desk, back to the couch and to her, and except for the harsh red outline of the curtains, his screen is the only light in the room. It catches blue and soft against his silhouette, showing her tense shoulders and hair dry as the codebooks propping up his monitor.

"I don’t think you’ve slept at all," she says as she stands, voice still muzzy, words slow and deliberate as she finds her feet. Sollux’s room is a disaster zone, a tornado warning unheeded and the way from her to him is a ruin of clothes and parts and empty takeout cartons. She steps over the grub sauce and the bee-print boxers she bought him when he turned six, allowing herself a little spin around a puddle of leaked server honey, and lands with just enough grace by his chair. Sollux’d give her a 9.8 at the very least, minus point two for the way her fingers catch against his armrest to still her movement, but she’d suspect some bias.

His fingers don’t stop at the keys when she touches down, and she would never expect them to, but a smile flickers across his face as she settles behind him. He slouches when he codes—those times he’s not hunched forward in desperate caffeinated focus, and she fits her head neatly between his doubled horns. Her fingers meet at his collar, her elbows hanging loose off his shoulders as she sets one foot against the wheels of his chair. His hair smells musty, and she can feel the static against her chin. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’s begun to collect fluff in the space behind his ears, and runs a finger behind one to check. He snorts, neck twitching as he tries to get away, and her laughter blows his fringe into his eyes. “I also don’t think you’ve answered me, mister,” she says again, settling her hand back around his neck. She can feel a fraction of a shrug against the weight she leans against him, and he replies, “And you’d be damn correct in that thought, detective, congratulations.”

"You’re such an ass," she smiles, and he twists his head to knock a horn against her cheek. She gasps, and throws a couple knuckles into his jaw. 

"You punched me!" he laughs, fingers finally pausing their flurry across the keys to pull one of her hands into his, skin so much smoother than hers. 

"That is entirely wrong, I just papped you," she shoots back, and he shakes his head again, trying to unsettle her as he says, "Yeah, papped me with extreme prejudice. You’re a traitor to this moriallegiance, 007, assaulting your beloved palemate in his weakened state."

"Oh, hm," Aradia says, tapping a free finger across her lips in exaggerated thought. She makes sure to bump her forearm at least twice against Sollux’s nose, but lets him pull her other hand to rest over his on his stomach. "I think maybe you have engendered this weakened state by being really stupid and not sleeping in a sweep! Could this maybe be a possibility, Q?" 

Sollux snorts, a bit of jerk to his shoulders and air out his nose, and reaches for the mouse. “Ah ah ah,” Aradia tuts, and slaps her free hand across his eyes, continuing over his groaned complaints, “Sollux I have had my nose all over your hair and it is dry as bones! If you’ve have proper sleep in real sopor in two perigees then I’m a cluckbeast’s lusus—”

"Don’t you mean an arboreal—"

"Sollux, do not test me on this, I will throw you overhand into the recuperacoon. You looked terrible before you let me fall asleep on your couch half a day ago and now you look worse. Up."

Sollux heaves a sigh as Aradia detaches herself, setting a proprietary hand on the back of his chair as he clicks through window after window of Are You Sure? and Unsaved Changes! until the screen finally dims to black. He still sits for a moment, scrubbing a hand across his face, so she ties her arm into his and hauls him to his feet. Face to face she can see the harsh yellow bags under his eyes, the deep lines around his eyebrows, the ways his eyes spark red and blue in faint, tiny flashes. He’s six seasons younger than her but with the proportions of a very bony tree, so she has to tilt his head down a bit to make him meet her eyes. She bites at her lip in sympathy as her thumb traces against his cheekbone, saying, “It’s your head again, isn’t it. That’s why you’ve stayed up?”

Sollux shrugs a bit, and nods, and shifts on his feet, each movement confused in the other. The bees hum drowsily in their hives, and the city moves quietly in the day. She hears every trip of tongue against teeth when he replies, “The voices have been especially egregious lately in their tales of the beyond. They get loud when I’m close to conking out, so I stopped trying. It wasn’t pleasant.”

"I know," she sighs, and he does little more than nod jerkily against her palm, but she can tell he’d forgotten for a second. He’s very inward-focused, her Sollux, and there’s that occasional half-second of remembrance when she speaks of the dead susurrus in her own mind. She doesn’t hold it against him. 

"But it’ll be alright with the two of us," she says, tickling behind his ear again to make his lips quirk up. "I’ll talk to them if they come, make sure they give you a night off every season or so."

Sollux looks like he’ll protest,  probably something silly and self-depricating and not even close to the point, so she pre-empts him. She simply turns for the ‘coon, and hands still tied together, he follows. 

They don’t bother to fold their clothes as they strip, just dumping them among the rest of the mess as shoes are kicked off and shirts are dislodged from horns with a minimum of swearing. Sollux gets the filters running as Aradia ties her hair back, and she’s sure the slime will be stale, but it’s not a big deal. They’ll just be a bit mustier in the morning, have to spend a bit longer in the ablution trap. She steps in first, and even standing beside his own ‘coon, naked as the day he pupated, she still has to tug at his hand and pull a face before he sighs and clambers in behind her. 

The sopor sloshes in their wake as they settle against one end. It’s a bit too small for the two of them, one of Sollux’s knees surfacing midway like an iceberg in a cold sea and the slime just a hair’s breadth below the rim of the ‘coon, but it’s not a big deal. Aradia drags spirals in the red and blue slime with the tip of her finger as Sollux settles against her chest, wrapping his skin and bone arms around her waist. Her other arm comes down around his shoulders. The sopor line’s just above her nose, engulfed him except for the tips of his horns, and when she blows a bubble or two into the slime she can feel him hug her closer. 

"It’s OK," she tells his submerged form, rubbing a hand up and down his arm. His forehead brushes against her collarbone. "Go to sleep, Sollux. I promise I’ll keep watch."

He’s out in a matter of minutes, and not long later she sinks beneath the sopor to join him.


	2. resuscitate

Sollux finds her out in yellow fields, under evening skies, wrapping her fists in tape and watching the frayed cords of her whip catch against the stalks of the tall, stiff grasses. They bend about him when he touches down, rippling out and out and further out in flickering waves like he’s a cliff face sliding into the ocean, and Aradia absolutely refuses to turn away from the roll of the horizon until he sits beside her and swats the tape from her hands. She won’t bend the first three fingers of her right hand past the knuckle and her cheek is a livid red bruise. He’ll bet boonbucks her cheekbone’s broken, eye only kept in her head by the way she sits straight like a column and never looks down.

“So, who trounced your rustblood shit this time,” he says, opening the conversation with less a a bang and more of a sneer.

“You’re entirely an ass,” Aradia spits back, really spitting it, a little chunk of fang dropping into her lap between ‘you’re’ and ‘entirely.’ She wipes blood from her mouth in a long drag from thumb joint to wrist and says, “I haven’t lost since Tavros fell off a cliff.”

Sollux takes her broken, flinching hand in his and begins to wrap the tape as best he can. She corrects him in hissing breaths between her teeth and he continues, “And I’ll bet you’re just dying to tell me how the other schmuck looks, too.”

“I don’t know how they look since I threw them into that ravine, but I think they might look worse than me, yes,” she replies, voice stiff as her back. She shakes for a second when Sollux wraps the gauze around her index finger, and he holds her wrist steady with a thin rush a psionics. Aradia dead-eyes him but doesn’t say anything.

“So you want to know how I found you out here in the fucking wastes?” Sollux asks to fill the silence. He’s obviously uncomfortable this far out from the cities and the crowd, among the hum of the swarmbeasts and the windy night, and the sound of his own voice is an equally obvious comfort. “It’s not like any of you FLARP nuts carry a GPS on you, or a phone, or any other equally useful evidence of Alternia’s progression past the stone age.”

Aradia says, “You heard the voices of the imminently deceased,” before Sollux can begin on the second part of his hit series The World Is Difficult And I’m Going To Complain About It and he immediately deflates. “Well, yeah, fine, if you’re gonna just cut me off before I can get to the good part,” he grumbles, and she pulls her hand back into her lap, gently closing her fingers into a loose fist.

Sollux slouches against her, propping his elbows against his bent knees and rubbing at his knuckles. A thin, shapeless cord of her snapped whip wraps around his leg before he shakes it off into the wind. Aradia doesn’t so much lean back as let him shift into her side, continuing over his grumbles, “I can hear one of their ghosts now. I didn’t mean to kill her, but I suppose these things can’t be avoided sometimes.”

He watches her and she’s straight as as a beam, every pound of her counterbalanced about a stone center, but he catches how her eyes flicker to the left, to the grasses and the locusts spiraling up above the hills, buoyed by the winds in the low ravine. He drums his fingers against her wrist and she lets him slide his hand into her unbandaged grip as a whisper in his head dims and fades. Her fingers tighten around his, nails digging between his knuckles, and he knows the whisper’s gone from his hearing to bloom in hers. She doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t know what he’d ask her, so they sit, and the wind is warm for this time of year, and the green moon sinks dim beneath the hills as the pink moon rises glorious above it.

Sollux becomes aware, too slowly and to his shame, that Aradia is crying.

“Oh, shit, hey,” he says, throwing a leg over her knees and straddling her narrow shins. “No, please don’t cry, why are you crying?”

Aradia’s not sobbing or wailing but she presses one ginger hand to her eye, careful of the bruises swallowing her cheekbone, and sniffles. Sollux watches in dismay as she very carefully begins to weep, eyes closed, unable to bend forward into the comfort of her own chest lest she lose an eyeball to gravity and the grass, and she doesn’t say anything for two long minutes. Sollux sits on her legs and holds her hand and runs his fingers through her thick clouds of hair until she manages, quiet and choking, “I don’t want to be like her.”

“You’re not, AA,” Sollux says before he even understands he’s saying it, suddenly desperate to catch her eye. “You’re not her. Vriska’s crazy and fucked in the head, and—and she’s—”

“She’s a killer, right?” Aradia sobs over him, eyes bright and sunken in red, voice rough around the tears in her throat, and he’s chanting  _no no you’re not like that it’s not like that_ under her rising shout. “That’s what you were going to say, right? Because I’m a killer, too, Sollux, I just—I just  _killed_  those  _kids_!”

She chokes again, eyes slamming closed rather than look at him when she can’t turn away for the pain in her ribs and he takes his chance, carefully cupping one cheek and pressing his forehead to hers. “It doesn’t make you her,” he whispers, fingers pressing under her eye, behind her ear, at the edge of her jaw. “She’s crazy, ok, she’s not like you, she’s not.”

Aradia scoffs damply, pushing Sollux away. “You used that one already.” She keeps her eyes closed, breathing through her nose, and Sollux flounders, racing for what to do. He’s a sorry fucking excuse for a moirail, he realizes, but if he could just get past that this one time and actually be of a solitary fucking use that would be just fantas—

“I would do it again,” Aradia says, into the reddening night, and Sollux spins out.

“They hurt me, so I hurt them back,” she says, because Sollux still can’t find the shape of his reply, lips working soundlessly in the dim, and fresh tears track over the breaks in her face but she doesn’t pause. “I know what it makes me. I know I’m no better than her. But if they came after me again, and I knew they’d come, I’d kill them before they touched me. I’d kill them before they touched Tavros, or you, or—”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, chest ballooning on the inhale, and when Sollux leans forward once more, she lets him, relaxing inch by inch into his arms around her back. He mumbles soft gibberish into her ear, a dozen false starts at commiseration, and she wraps her good hand into his ratty shirt. The wind picks up in their soft silence, ensconcing their joined heads in gusts of her hair and his perpetual scent of ozone and stale caffeine.

“It doesn’t make you her,” he whispers, and she realizes he’s been whispering it a while as she clutched at his shirt and ached through every rib. “She’s a cruel and a raging bitch and hurts people for her own sick pleasure, ok? You’re not like that, Aradia, you’re not like her. You love me and Tavros and a whole bunch of other people and she’s never loved a person for longer than a day of her fucking blueblood life. You’re not like her.”

Aradia nods into his shoulder, feeling his breath in her hair, and lets him talk. He does at length, still perched on her knees until she shifts and then they’re just sitting together, buried in the waving grass, invisible in the deepening night, and he talks until the green moon is vanished from the sky and he’s run out of ways to say,  _I love you, I love you, I’m sorry, I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the first story and half of the second before forgetting about this for eight months, which, to my shame, kinda shows. I wrote the first story without the intent to write a matched set, but then realized (with help) that there is waaaay too much fic of Sollux being sad and getting papped, and so wrote the second to atone for my dudecentric sins. Aradia's way more screwed up, anyways, she totally beat the shit out of Vriska that one time.
> 
> (for lionpyh)


End file.
